Let the Dead Speak

by Jane Casey

  Derwent nodded soberly. ‘That could be part of the trouble, though. He must miss his dad. Melissa never let him see any of the violence. He didn’t know about her injuries. As far as he’s concerned, his mummy and daddy loved each other very much and then Mummy took him away. Daddy disappeared out of his life from one day to the next.’

  ‘But you’re there.’

  ‘It’s not the same.’

  ‘Isn’t it? He adores you, you know that.’

  Derwent put a hand up to his eyes, rubbing at them with his forefinger and thumb. ‘Fuck’s sake. I’m not crying. My eyes are watering because I’m tired.’

  ‘Yeah, of course. I think we drove past someone chopping onions, actually. That’s probably it.’

  ‘Don’t take the piss,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’

  ‘I want to look after him. That’s all. And I don’t know how to make it better for him.’

  ‘It’s a phase.’

  Derwent squinted at me. ‘What do you know about it?’

  ‘That’s what my brother says about every annoying thing his kids do. Everything’s a phase. In a month’s time he’ll be sleeping beautifully and you’ll have something else to worry about.’

  He thought about it. ‘Thanks, mate.’

  ‘Any time.’ I got out of the car and looked up and down Constantine Avenue. The houses were detached, set back from the road and there were no pedestrians. It was quiet, and private. ‘This is going to be rubbish for witnesses.’

  ‘Come on.’ Derwent led the way through the gate and paused to scan the gravel in front of the house. ‘What do you think? Tyre marks?’

  ‘None to speak of.’ I crouched down, trying to see. ‘Nope. There isn’t enough gravel for that.’

  ‘Typical.’ He looked up at the house. It was a 1930s house with ugly aluminium-framed windows that had probably been put in four decades after the house was built. It had a general air of being unoccupied. The curtains were drawn in every window and weeds had sprouted through cracks in the steps. Some rubbish had blown in from the street and tangled in the undergrowth. ‘You’d know it was empty, wouldn’t you.’

  ‘Empty or that it belonged to someone elderly.’ I followed him through the front door, working my hands into my gloves as a precaution but also because I really didn’t want to touch anything. I stepped over the slithery pile of post and junk mail on the doormat, wrinkling my nose. ‘It stinks in here.’

  ‘Not as much as the nursing home did.’ Derwent looked back at me. ‘When I get old, I’m going to Switzerland to end it all. No way do I want to drag out my days staring at the walls surrounded by a load of drooling vegetables.’

  ‘It can’t have been that bad.’

  ‘Whatever you’re imagining, it was worse.’ He strode into the kitchen, snapping with energy now that we were working again, the hunter’s instinct overriding fatigue. I tried and failed to visualise him as an old man. Impossible to think of him being calm, sitting quietly, staring at the walls. He’d burn the place down first.

  The living room curtains were faded and worn, the material grubby on the edges where Harold Lowe had pulled them closed night after night. I pushed one back to let some more light in, revealing a room full of the kind of furniture my grandparents liked: dark mahogany tables that were cloudy with dust, over-stuffed armchairs with heavily textured upholstery, a wood-framed sofa that was so far out of fashion it had come back in. Dust and fibres floated in the light that slanted in, as thick as mist, and I thought of William Turner’s antiseptic home. I believed he had asthma – no one could have faked the attack he had experienced in front of me – but clean homes made me suspicious, on the whole. A lot of people became surprisingly house-proud when they had something to hide.

  Derwent poked his head in. ‘Anything strange?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Upstairs, then.’

  ‘Does Harold have any family?’

  ‘No. He’s on his own.’ Derwent’s mouth thinned. ‘Poor old bugger. He was so pleased someone had come to see him. The house is going to be sold to pay for his nursing home. God knows what they’re charging for it.’

  ‘So what happens to all of this stuff?’

  ‘No idea. Charity? He doesn’t want to come home, he says. I think he was lonely here.’

  ‘Well, that’s something, isn’t it? Maybe if you’re ninety-odd and you don’t want to live on your own any more you don’t mind being in a home.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Derwent didn’t sound convinced.

  I went up the stairs first and glanced into the first bedroom: Harold’s own, the bed stripped, the mattress covered in overlapping stains. The room next door was a study, followed by a bathroom and a separate lavatory. The air was stale, the rooms dusty and worn out, the smell of pine still surprisingly strong in the bathroom. There was something tragic about the things he’d left behind – a brush with yellowing bristles, a cracked bar of soap, a face cloth hanging stiffly at an angle over the edge of the sink where he’d left it to dry. Kate Emery’s house had been the same. Life, stopped.

  ‘Whoever buys this place is going to have to gut it,’ Derwent said. ‘Keep the walls and start again with the rest.’

  I was about to answer him as I pushed open the door to the last room at the back of the house, but the words evaporated. I stood for a second, my brain trying to work out what was bothering me. It smelled wrong, that was it. The room smelled, but not of stale air and old clothes like the rest of the house. And I knew better than to override the feeling that something wasn’t right.

  ‘What is it?’ Derwent was right behind me, jostling me, trying to see.

  ‘Wait.’ I put a hand up. ‘Someone’s been in here.’

  The curtains were drawn at the window but there was a gap that let some light into the room. It was a bedroom, the bed covered in a pink candlewick bedspread, the cream carpet worn and thin underfoot. I edged forward and crouched to look under the bed. There was a knotted condom on the carpet, curled up, forgotten. That was the smell I’d caught.

  ‘This should be good for DNA.’ I straightened up. ‘I’m not touching it. I’ll let the SOCOs recover it.’

  Derwent drew back the bedspread carefully. There was a pale green sheet on the bed with a ghostly white mark in the exact centre.

  ‘I don’t think Harold has been banging his brains out in here,’ he said. ‘So the question is, who has?’

  ‘More than one couple.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I pointed. ‘Semen stain. On the floor, we have a condom. When the semen is inside the condom, it’s not generally all over the bed.’

  Derwent grinned. ‘In your experience.’

  ‘Yes. I know what I’m talking about.’

  The grin widened. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘I don’t want to shock you, but I have had sex. A few times, actually.’

  Derwent was inspecting the rest of the room. ‘Not for a while.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You are so creepy. Of course you don’t know.’

  ‘You haven’t.’ He glanced at me. ‘But when you do, I’ll know.’

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  A slow, emphatic nod.

  ‘You’re disgusting.’

  ‘It’s like a sixth sense.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘I see things.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure sight is one of the basic five.’

  He recovered with barely a flicker. ‘Look, all I’m saying is, you can’t hide that kind of thing from me. I know you too well. You’re not getting any and you haven’t been for a long, long time. So when you do, I’m going to notice the difference.’

  ‘You’re deluded. And perverted.’

  ‘Just observant. Anyway, it could be one couple. Maybe they ran out of condoms and took a chance.’

  ‘Kate had keys to this house. Who else did?’

  Derwent shrugged. ‘No one, as far as I know. The nei
ghbour only has a key to the garden. Harold didn’t mention anyone else.’

  ‘There was no sign of anyone breaking in. We have to assume Kate was using the house or letting someone else use it.’

  ‘Or someone stole her keys.’

  ‘Either way, we need to know who was here. And why they were using this room.’ I nudged the curtain back, noticing a fragile curl of ash that ghosted along the sill, and a sticky mark where something round had rested. ‘That’s a hell of a good view of Kate’s house. Maybe that’s why they chose this room.’

  ‘Or it’s a complete coincidence. It can’t be connected with her murder or they’d have done a better job of cleaning up. You’d have to be as thick as pigshit and you’d have to know nothing about criminal investigation to leave this place as it is without even attempting to get rid of the sheet, not to mention the rest.’

  ‘Maybe they meant to. Maybe they didn’t have time. Chloe came back early, remember? She wasn’t supposed to be here until Tuesday. Maybe they thought they could come back and clear up at their leisure, but then there were police everywhere and they couldn’t take the risk.’ I looked around. ‘Remember, if it wasn’t for the dog leading us here, we probably wouldn’t have known about the house. Kate’s keys were gone, along with the keys for this place. There was nothing to send us over here. They probably thought they could leave this stuff here forever. They gambled and lost.’

  ‘So this counts as us being lucky.’ Derwent rubbed his forehead with the back of a gloved hand. ‘Excuse me if I don’t rush out and buy a lottery ticket.’

  9

  I left Derwent with Kev Cox and Una Burt, trying to justify why we’d trampled all over a house that was suddenly vital to the investigation. From the looks on their faces, ignorance was not going to be an adequate defence. Burt in particular had a wild look in her eyes that was as close to panic as I’d ever seen in her. She was presiding over a murder investigation with no body and no suspects, after all; it wasn’t a reputation-maker. And through no real fault of our own, we’d lost an opportunity to watch and wait for the perpetrator to come to us. Whatever the forensic evidence said – assuming we hadn’t compromised that too – there was nothing to compare to catching someone red-handed.

  It wasn’t only cowardice that made me slip away. I wanted to speak to Chloe Emery again, this time alone. I didn’t think that Georgia had put her off the previous day – I doubted Chloe had even noticed she was in the room – but it couldn’t hurt to try a more casual approach.

  I rang the doorbell at number 32 and waited. It was Morgan Norris who came to the door, his expression forbidding. I thought for a moment that he wasn’t going to let me in but then the scowl faded and he clapped a hand to his head.

  ‘You’re the police officer who was here yesterday. Sorry, I didn’t recognise you. Your hair was … um … different.’

  I let that go without acknowledgement. The difference humidity made to my hair could be measured in yards. ‘I’m sorry to bother you. I wanted to speak to Chloe again.’

  ‘Have you found anything?’ He glanced up the stairs as he spoke, wary of being overheard.

  ‘It’s a routine follow-up. No news.’

  ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ He fiddled with the chain on the back of the door, frowning at it as if it was important. ‘There’s hope.’

  Hope could be far more destructive than grief. I didn’t say that to him. I smiled instead.

  ‘Is Chloe upstairs?’

  ‘I believe so.’ I started to move past him and he put his hand on my wrist. ‘Wait. Eleanor wants a word first. She’s in the kitchen.’

  I was about to say no. He was holding on to me firmly, but not tightly, and his hand was very warm against the soft skin on the inside of my wrist. I objected on principle to being grabbed. If he could feel my pulse under his fingers he would know my heart was pounding.

  But my reaction was nothing to do with Morgan Norris. I wasn’t scared of him.

  And I didn’t want to miss out on a chance to speak to Eleanor Norris again just because I was offended by some uninvited manhandling.

  Norris tilted his head to one side. He had dark eyelashes, several shades darker than his hair, and they made his eyes look lighter. It was attractive, and he knew it. ‘Please.’

  ‘All right.’ I twisted my wrist out of his grasp but without drama. I knew he would never have touched a male DS and it annoyed me but there was nothing I could do about it.

  ‘I want to apologise too,’ he said quickly.

  I had already started towards the kitchen. I stopped and looked back at him. ‘For what?’

  ‘Calling you names yesterday. It was a stupid joke and I was sorry as soon as I said it. We were all under a lot of strain.’

  I genuinely couldn’t think what he meant at first. ‘Oh – when you said we were the filth, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m not proud of it.’

  ‘I’ve heard it before. I’ve heard worse.’

  ‘You weren’t at all like what I was expecting.’

  I frowned. ‘Expecting?’

  ‘When they said a detective would come round.’ He shoved his hands in his pockets, doing the awkward little boy act. ‘I was expecting someone tougher. Older.’

  ‘Great.’ I managed to get a world of I-don’t-care into my voice. ‘Shall we get on with this?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’ He looked upset, sincerely so, and I revised my impression of him: maybe it hadn’t been an act after all. Maybe he genuinely did feel awkward about what he’d said.

  But I couldn’t quite believe he was unsure of himself when he’d had the confidence to take hold of me. My wrist ached. That was psychosomatic. It was the memory of having to fight for my life that was flooding my body with adrenalin, not real, actual pain. It wasn’t fear of where I was or what I was doing. It was a useless leftover, learned behaviour from experiences I wanted to leave far behind me. That wasn’t who I was any more.

  I squared my detective sergeant shoulders and lifted my chin and walked into the kitchen as if every step took me further away from the past. The past can’t hurt me any more.

  I knew it was a lie, but it was a comfort all the same.

  Eleanor Norris had her back to me. She was leaning over the kitchen table, reading a newspaper. ‘Who was it?’

  ‘DS Maeve Kerrigan,’ I said. ‘We met yesterday.’

  She actually jumped at the sound of my voice, whirling around with one hand to her throat, her eyes wide. Her gaze tracked over my shoulder to where Morgan Norris stood.

  ‘Calm down, Eleanor. It’s just a routine visit. She’s not even here to see you.’ There was an undercurrent of irritation in his voice. Something about Eleanor invited it: the pink-rimmed eyes, the small voice, the ostentatious meekness.

  ‘You gave me a fright. I didn’t hear two sets of footsteps, that’s all.’ She tried to smile. ‘Everyone creeps around here in their socks. I need to get hobnailed boots for them for Christmas so I can keep track of them.’

  ‘I came to see Chloe,’ I said. ‘But Morgan said you wanted to speak with me first.’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ A look passed between them that I couldn’t read. Norris went over and started leafing through the newspaper.

  ‘I wanted to say that Chloe is welcome to stay here as long as she likes,’ Eleanor said. ‘I – I hadn’t thought about it last night. I should have said it from the start. Of course she can rely on us.’

  ‘That’s a very generous offer,’ I said slowly, choosing my words with care. ‘It’s quite difficult to accommodate someone in your home, especially when you don’t know how long they might stay with you.’

  Norris laughed. ‘Eleanor knows that. She’s already got me.’

  ‘But you’re family.’ I bit my lip. ‘Look, the family liaison officer can give you more information—’

  ‘Her? I sent her home,’ Eleanor snapped. ‘She was a very stupid, offensive woman and all she did was make cups of tea in my kitchen.’

 
‘Offensive?’ I said, puzzled.

  ‘She didn’t quite understand about Eleanor and Oliver’s commitment to their church,’ Morgan Norris said. ‘She called them God-botherers.’

  ‘Oh. Well.’

  ‘Because Oliver invited her to join us in prayer,’ Eleanor said. ‘She obviously has no idea how much God could help her in her work.’

  ‘It’s a difficult job,’ I said diplomatically, thinking that Eleanor Norris was a nightmare and the FLO had probably skipped out of the house when she got her marching orders. ‘If she was here, she would tell you what I’m about to tell you. It’s natural to want to make everything right again in the aftermath of a crime. It’s easy to make commitments that you could find yourself regretting. And Chloe is an adult.’

  ‘How ridiculous. She couldn’t survive on her own with her limitations.’

  ‘Maybe not. There are other options, though. After all, she’s not an orphan. Her father—’

  ‘She can’t go and live with him.’ Morgan Norris looked up from the paper again. ‘It’s out of the question.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’s terrified of him.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘She said it herself. Last night.’ Eleanor folded her arms. ‘I asked her if she wanted to see him and she was beside herself. She begged me not to send her away. Of course I said she could stay here until she wanted to leave.’

  ‘Did she say why she was scared?’

  ‘No.’ Eleanor turned to her brother-in-law. ‘She didn’t, did she?’

  ‘She said she didn’t want to go to his house again,’ Norris said. ‘She wouldn’t say why.’

  ‘His house,’ I repeated. ‘So it’s not that she doesn’t want to see him.’

  ‘I can only tell you what she said. You’ll have to ask her what she meant.’

  ‘I just wanted to reassure her.’ Eleanor was back on the verge of tears. She had obviously been chewing over what I’d said to her, preparing to disagree with me. I had the feeling she was the kind of person who would keep returning to an argument until she felt she’d won. There was a word for them.